M.M. Fraz, M.Y. Javed, and A. Basit (Pakistan)
Medical imaging, morphological processing, retina, vessel segmentation, bit plane slicing
Retrieval of retinal vascular network is used for diagnosis, treatment, screening, evaluation and clinical study of many diseases. In this paper, a new automated method for segmentation of blood vessels in retinal images is proposed. The core of the technique is the combination of vessel centerline extraction approach with multidirectional morphological bit plane slicing. The centerlines are extracted by the application of directional differential operators and then evaluation of combination of derivative signs and average derivative values. Multidirectional top-hat operator with rotating structuring elements is used to emphasize the vessels in a particular direction and information is extracted using bit plane slicing. An iterative region growing method is applied to integrate the centerline and the images resulting from bit plane slicing of vessel direction dependent morphological filters. The approach is tested on two publicly available databases and results shows that the proposed algorithm can obtain the robust and accurate vessel tracings.
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